1) Stop making the tools to kill so easy to reach. I know, this is more down to individual idiots than a government thing, unless we're going into the gun control argument again, which honestly, I don't have time for today.

2) Stop giving them reasons to. Stop backing kids into corners, when a kid cries for help, fucking listen, don't make them feel like they're all on their own and the entire world is their enemy, because, you being an experienced soldier, what would you do if you genuinely thought the world, the system, everyone around you, was against you? Negotiate? I doubt it. That's what's going on here. Too many damaged souls left alone, too much evidence given to them that the world hates them.

If I ever met the guy I'd want to talk to him with a level head about why he's wrong, but, just from reading this, it's plain that he's so extreme in his views that any allowances he might give aren't worth fighting for and the fact that he can't back up any of his claims with facts just makes it so plain that all he can be classified as is ignorant.

"They've been playing Grand Theft Auto every spare moment since they were six years old." Who's they? Six years old, hmm, it has an 18 rating, surely that's a failure of the parents rather than the children? Isn't it a little strange that violence which has been related to video games, of which there are very few accounts, have been from people with other problems or influences that stop them from thinking like rational human beings?

I give up on him. A man who has been trained to kill by a highly elite force and then paid to do so is accusing everyone from the casual games to the competitive professionals of being violent murders when it's likely that most of them don't even have a criminal record, and those that do, surely games are their retreat? They don't want to hang out in gangs or with criminals so they seek games as their company? His argument is flawed to the point where it's mostly lies and speculation, and we're giving him the attention he wants.

1) Stop making the tools to kill so easy to reach. I know, this is more down to individual idiots than a government thing, unless we're going into the gun control argument again, which honestly, I don't have time for today.

2) Stop giving them reasons to. Stop backing kids into corners, when a kid cries for help, fucking listen, don't make them feel like they're all on their own and the entire world is their enemy, because, you being an experienced soldier, what would you do if you genuinely thought the world, the system, everyone around you, was against you? Negotiate? I doubt it. That's what's going on here. Too many damaged souls left alone, too much evidence given to them that the world hates them.

Depressing to see this wrong-headed argument again and again. There's no evidence showing an up-tick in violence in the last 20 years or so (i.e. when FPS + GTA games exploded in popularity). If anything violence fell then plateaued, see CDC statistics for the US as an example:

Andy Chalk:The Government Security News website stated that his address was "long on emotion, and short on supportive evidence and detailed reasoning."

Dude, you just got burned by the GSN. That's a whole new kind of low. Also, not sure we should be taking sensitivity advice from someone who founded "Killology." Hell, I'm not sure we should be taking advice from someone who thought "killology" should even be a word.

He probably assumes his killing, is was (he's retired) justified, as it is driven by nationalism and righteousness and other types of dogma bulls***. He's perhaps also assuming that video games skews the kids' perception of reality, thus making them think life works exactly like the game, i.e. with no consequences. Give a child a real gun on the other hand, and you're learning them "responsibility".

He's basically afraid people will start to kill for fun rather than for 'Mericuh.

Grossman apparently believes that we need to take steps to stop violence in schools in the same way we've made an effort to prevent fires. He pointed out that dozens of children are killed in schools every year by gun-toting maniacs, while not one has died in a fire in more than 50 years.

How......ignorant...narrow-minded...childish...insensitive...mean spirited...blatantly scaremongering...intellectually deprived...goat-fucking insane and holy bejeebus stupid does one have to be to actually believe that kind of depressingly high level of bullshit?

Whatever his agenda is, (which I don't care about in the slightest, because why would you begin to take just another Jack Thompson wannabe seriously?), he's doing a terrible job at keeping whatever integrity that he could have possibly had to have any kind of leg to stand on, but by the looks of it, I don't think that there's any need for anyone to call him out on this, since he's doing a pretty good job at crashing and burning all by himself.

Why am i getting the feeling he is just bullshitting this to get free publicity?

This topic has discussed to death, the people that say "gamers are murdererzz" have been proven wrong time and time again. Yet they keep bringing it up.

What is most disturbing is that these kind of people are well respected and some people actually listen, and believe what these idiots say.

There have been reports stating that crime rates actually DROPPED when a big AAA game was released.

But lets get some other arguments in here.-He kills real people, we out smart ones and zeros-He creates something called KILLOLOGY.-Last i checked, no one was killed by a dvd. It was always the guns that caused people to die(and no, not trying to let this turn into a gun debate)

It's not that the people who decide to go on mass killing sprees had some sort of metal issue or other severe issues with access to legally purchased firearms. No it's because they play Dora the explorer.

Like i said in the gameviolence debate news topic from yesterday. If someone would walk in a room full of people and start shooting, without EVER having played a game. Everyone who wants to keep guns (2nd amendment and all that) start screaming "guns don't kill people, people kill people."

But when the same thing happens and he has one video game in his house, that gets the blame.

Seriously how bloody daft are these people and who the hell put them in charge.

The Rogue Wolf:So on one hand we have the usual pablum about "games are making kids into killers!" without even approaching the concept of just keeping kids from playing them (with some of that "parental supervision" stuff I heard about somewhere), and on the other hand he calls for hunting down and killing others and apparently advocates the continued presence of US troops in Afghanistan (which has gotten us exactly what over the past decade-plus?).

I mean, the term "killology" is enough to scoff at, but now I wonder if the US Army does intelligence testing as a part of its officer selection.

It's an inside joke within the Air Force (not sure if the other branches indulge this) that both the Army and Marines are a few fries short of full combo meal from McDonald's. It's all in good fun though. Usually.

I respect this guy on the grounds alone that he's a retired Lieutenant Colonel, but that's where it ends (also because I've never heard of this guy before now, so I'm greatly lacking the prerequisite amount of fucks to give at the moment). Not to mention that you'd think a retired veteran would be the first person to realize that handling a weapon in a video game is way different than handling that same weapon in real life.

This is just ludicrous. There has been, and continues to be a huge decline in violent crime across the Western World over the last three decades. To say there has been a "dramatic uptick in real world violence", let alone to try to connect this fictional upsurge in violence to video games, is preposterous and disingenuous.

First let me say that Grossman is not merely respected for his pedigree but for the quality of the theories that he has laid out in his several books. I have read On Killing and have heard him speak when he was invited by by Brigade Commander to speak to the 3rd BCT of the 101st Airborne Division before my first tour in Iraq. His ideas of video games being trainers for mass murderers is that he likens them to military style training, which pursues realism in the training environment, but lacking the control mechanism such as target identification and not shooting until told to do so. In truth his opinion comes from a place of being unfamiliar with how these games are actually made and how the missions are constructed. There are controls enforced in most of these games. Many shooters will penalize you for engaging a friendly or non-combatant target. Rescue missions where you are required to defend a non-combatant from hostiles is also a fairly common mission type. In CoD3 Mission mode there is a mission where you must rescue friendly rebels and another where you have the choice to rescue individuals that are about to be executed. Missions like this display the fire control and target acquisition disciplines that Grossman claims that video games don't have. Despite the fact that they get all the attention, games like Grand Theft Auto and the CoD2 airport mission are exceptions and not really the norm. The airport mission is actually skippable.

In 2007 the Department of Justice helped fund a study to see if there was a causal link between violent video games and actual violence. This study was later published as a book called "Grand Theft Childhood". What they found was that there was no link between violence in media and violence in real life and that often the focus on straw men like violent games detracted from attention to know contributors to violence such as economic status and mental health. Studies like this are often ignored because they don't say what people who want to find a scapegoat want to hear.

Generic_Dave:This is just ludicrous. There has been, and continues to be a huge decline in violent crime across the Western World over the last three decades. To say there has been a "dramatic uptick in real world violence", let alone to try to connect this fictional upsurge in violence to video games, is preposterous and disingenuous.

According to a report released this month by the Department of Justice, since 1993, firearm homicides are down 40% and "nonfatal firearm-related violent victimizations" are down 70% (http://bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/fv9311.pdf). During that same period some of the most realistic and violent shooters have seen release. At the same time, in a survey done by Pew Research, only 12% of Americans were able to correctly answer that gun violence was declining with 56% thinking that it was going up (http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2013/05/07/gun-homicide-rate-down-49-since-1993-peak-public-unaware/). The majority of the argument seems to be based on a fearful, hyperbolic perception of reality rather than an objective gathering of facts. Unfortunately this means that, since one side of the argument is fundamentally based on a mythology that they hold to with the tenacity of a starving dog defending a scrap of bone, the voices of reason are in the end screaming at the wind.

We can't have video games teaching kids to kill......that's the military's job once they turn 18.

If find it very hard to take this guy's opinions seriously. I'm sure he has some valid points but when a guy who's killed real people in reality is telling me to stop killing fake people in make believe......well, he just sounds like a major douche-canoe.

Nothing much to see here, it's another right-wing nutjob thinking all of us are foaming at the mouth whenever we aren't given life bars and hit boxes to mess with. He'll flap his gums, his already conquered audience will freak out, he'll get a seat on The View - and the rest of the planet will not give a single fuck.